Gresham College Lectures

Inigo Jones and the Architecture of Necessity

20 Jun 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Inigo Jones is the architect best-known for the Banqueting House on Whitehall, one of the icons of British state architecture. He is less well known f...

The Journey from Black-Hole Singularities to a Cyclic Cosmology

16 Jun 2022

Contributed by Lukas

The “singularity theorems” of the 1960s demonstrated that large enough celestial bodies, or collections of such bodies, would, collapse gravitatio...

How to Finance a Company

15 Jun 2022

Contributed by Lukas

How should companies raise money? This lecture will look at both debt (bank loans and bonds) and equity (shares given to other founders, or sold on t...

Protestant Missions and European Empires: Allies or Adversaries?

15 Jun 2022

Contributed by Lukas

By the later eighteenth century, Protestant countries’ empires were spreading across the globe but Protestant churches were wriggling free of state ...

Life in the Universe

14 Jun 2022

Contributed by Lukas

How can life form in the Universe, and what are the necessary ingredients for habitability so that planets can sustain life? Can we expect life elsewh...

Where Is Globalisation Headed? A Supply Chain View

13 Jun 2022

Contributed by Lukas

The conflict in Ukraine – and earlier events like Brexit - led prominent asset managers such as BlackRock to declare the “end of globalisation.”...

The Maths of Gyroscopes and Boomerangs

13 Jun 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Spinning things are strange. Why does a spinning top stand up? Why doesn't a rolling wheel fall over? How does a falling cat always manage to lan...

Investigative Journalism: A New Global Power?

07 Jun 2022

Contributed by Lukas

The Internet and enhanced tools of digitalisation and communication have given opportunities to investigative journalists undreamed of even 10 years a...

How Genetic Adaptation Helped Humans Colonise the Globe

07 Jun 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Modern humans evolved in Africa and successfully colonised the globe only in the last 100,000 years or so, a feat made possible by cultural and geneti...

Natural Prosperity and the Wellbeing Economy

06 Jun 2022

Contributed by Lukas

What does Natural Prosperity look like? In this lecture we envision a new, more equitable future where wellbeing and nature-based solutions take the ...

Operating Systems

01 Jun 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Early computers were either designed to do one thing or, if they were programmable, they would be loaded-up with the program, it would run, and then a...

Should the Commonwealth Caribbean Abolish Appeals to the Privy Council?

31 May 2022

Contributed by Lukas

In the Commonwealth Caribbean, final appeals were traditionally heard by the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, or ‘Her Majesty in Council’....

The Incredible Sine Wave and its Uses

31 May 2022

Contributed by Lukas

The beautiful sine wave turns out to have a huge number of practical applications, from the motion of springs, to waves in the sea, to sound waves, li...

The Year 1948 in Soviet Music

27 May 2022

Contributed by Lukas

In the aftermath of the Soviet war victory, ideological control was tightened again, contrary to expectations. The six leading Soviet composers (inclu...

How to Value a Stock

25 May 2022

Contributed by Lukas

How do you value stocks? Finance textbooks argue that you should look at their dividends. But many stocks don’t pay dividends, and even if they do, ...

The Future of Health Globally

23 May 2022

Contributed by Lukas

This lecture looks at the very optimistic picture of trends in health around the world. Childhood deaths and the diseases of young adults are falling ...

Abstinence

20 May 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Abstinence from sex is a requirement for many people seeking a spiritual life. In the U.S., abstinence-only education has been officially endorsed sin...

Bernini and the Remaking of Rome

19 May 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Pope Alexander VII did more for Rome than any other Pope when in 1655 he employed the sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini to reshape the city. Already celeb...

The Future of Life on Earth

19 May 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Although life is probably widespread in the universe, our pale blue dot, Earth, is the only known place harbouring intelligent life. Even if we manage...

Breaking Democracy: Lies, Deception and Disinformation

11 May 2022

Contributed by Lukas

With conspiracy theories and disinformation on the rise in both media and politics, is our democracy at risk? We may lose trust in society, in the ins...

Averting the Insect Apocalypse

11 May 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Recent studies from around the world show insects are disappearing fast. If this continues, this will have profound consequences for mankind and for o...

The Beginnings of Protestantism in Asia

11 May 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Early Protestant empires in Asia – in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, Taiwan and elsewhere – brought missionaries with them. Like their Catholic pred...

Oxford’s Savilian Professors of Geometry: 400 Years On

06 May 2022

Contributed by Lukas

England’s earliest chair of mathematics was that of Gresham College, founded in 1597, but who came next? The earliest University-based mathematics ...

What Can We Learn From Fakes?

06 May 2022

Contributed by Lukas

It seems that fakes are everywhere – very few domains of social life are exempt from concerns about fakes and a general ‘crisis of authenticity’...

Supply Chains in the Wellbeing Economy

04 May 2022

Contributed by Lukas

In this lecture we are going to look at how the supply chains in a wellbeing economy bring together local production of food and stewardship of nature...

People and Purpose: Putting Positive Impact at The Heart of Economic Growth

04 May 2022

Contributed by Lukas

As we build on the economic recovery from COVID-19, we need to put our people and our purpose at the heart of financial and professional services to r...

Soviet Music in World War II

27 Apr 2022

Contributed by Lukas

The tribulations of WWII (the “Great Patriotic War”) prompted a temporary liberalisation within Soviet culture. Images of horror and grief, former...

The Surprising Uses of Conic Sections

27 Apr 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Conic sections – the curves made by slicing through cones at various angles – were studied by the ancient Greeks, but because of their useful prop...

The Global Financial Crisis and COVID... What Next?

25 Apr 2022

Contributed by Lukas

‘Hyper-globalisation’ and the power of finance culminated in the global financial crisis of 2008 that was potentially as severe as the Great Depre...

Integral Transforms

21 Apr 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Integral transforms are the most rarefied of analyses – only used by a subset of engineers and computer scientists; laboured over by many an undergr...

Social Media, COVID & Ukraine: Fighting Disinformation

20 Apr 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Organised disinformation about the Covid-19 crisis has degraded public understanding of the crisis and threatened the reputation of credible vaccines ...

Humour and Music

19 Apr 2022

Contributed by Lukas

The scherzo (‘joke’) emerged in the vocal music of Monteverdi and became integrated into the string quartets and symphonies of Beethoven. Haydn an...

Freezing Eggs and Delaying Fertility: Law, Ethics and Society

14 Apr 2022

Contributed by Lukas

With the development of new vitrification techniques, egg freezing has become a viable option for women to protect and extend their fertility. Being a...

Taking on a Corporate Giant: David v Goliath Legal Cases

13 Apr 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Many people are inspired by stories of individual litigants, often with few financial resources and little assistance, taking on large corporations in...

Villains in the Novel: from Dickens, Hardy and Wilkie Collins to Hilary Mantel

11 Apr 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Are villains cardboard characters? If so, why do we enjoy them so much? Drawing examples from film and TV drama, as well as from popular fiction, thi...

Is Dementia Inevitable?

06 Apr 2022

Contributed by Lukas

What is dementia? Is it inevitable as we live longer that more of us will suffer dementia, or could we live longer lives without getting it? There ar...

Planetary Universe

05 Apr 2022

Contributed by Lukas

How can new worlds be discovered, and how many exo-planets might be out there? What does today’s technology in astronomical observatories now enable...

Going Viral: An Environmental Activist's Story

01 Apr 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Dr Nathan Robinson’s video of him removing a plastic drinking straw from a sea turtle’s nose went viral in 2015. He has since been developing new ...

Aliens in Science Fiction

01 Apr 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Science fiction’s most frequent alternative to human is 'alien', another rich imaginative resource with which to think about what makes us...

Segregation and the Rule of Law

30 Mar 2022

Contributed by Lukas

The law has been used to entrench and uphold racial prejudice, most infamously in South Africa during the apartheid years, but also in the United Stat...

Monogamy

25 Mar 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Monogamy is a hotly contested practice. In many cis-gender marriages, engaging in sexual intercourse with a non-spouse is regarded as a serious betray...

Infections That Use Touch to Transmit

25 Mar 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Some diseases are spread almost exclusively by touch or through the skin or mucus membranes. These include Ebola, several parasitic diseases such as h...

The Neuroscience of Sleep and its Disorders

24 Mar 2022

Contributed by Lukas

A good night's sleep is anything but quiet: a myriad of processes occupy our brains, crucial for every aspect of our waking lives. Our increased ...

Does Philanthropy do the Public Good?

23 Mar 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Philanthropy has long played a key role in our communities on local, national, and global scales. Yet if we have often assumed that giving is good, we...

Psychosis: Our Default Mental State?

22 Mar 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Psychosis is a mental state where people experience a 'different' world. If, as clinical psychiatry and neuroscience suggests, it is our &ap...

The Beauty of Geometrical Curves

16 Mar 2022

Contributed by Lukas

The path traced out by a given point on the rim of a circle as you roll it along a straight line is a beautiful curve called a cycloid, whose appeal t...

Human Rights in the UK and the Commonwealth Caribbean

16 Mar 2022

Contributed by Lukas

The Human Rights Act 1998, which incorporated the European Convention on Human Rights into domestic law, was a landmark moment in British legal histor...

How Protestant Missionaries Encountered Slavery

15 Mar 2022

Contributed by Lukas

The entire Atlantic economy in the 17th and 18th centuries was based on the enslavement of (mostly) non-Christian Africans. As this lecture will show,...

Cellular Phones

14 Mar 2022

Contributed by Lukas

The most commonly used computer in the world is surely the one in your hand. Mobile or cellular telephony is nowadays hardly about telephony at all, b...

Coincidences in the Novel: Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot to Evelyn Waugh and David Nicholls

08 Mar 2022

Contributed by Lukas

If, as displeased reviewers and readers sometimes complain, coincidences mar good plots, why do so many novels turn on them? From Charlotte Brontë an...

Innovators and Entrepreneurs in a Wellbeing Economy

08 Mar 2022

Contributed by Lukas

What will the characteristics of successful innovators and entrepreneurs be in a wellbeing economy? In this lecture, we look at how the Wellbeing Eco...

Life in a Revolutionary Decade in Britain (1649-1660)

07 Mar 2022

Contributed by Lukas

What was life like in 1649-1660, Britain's only decade as a republic? This lecture explores the immense changes of the period through the person...

Coral Reefs in a Warming World

03 Mar 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Coral reefs are transforming under climate change. What is the nature of this change and the major influences upon it? The role of common management a...

How to Measure and Manage Risk

02 Mar 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Risk is one of the most powerful and dangerous concepts in finance – powerful because it allows individuals and companies to earn huge returns, but ...

Magnetic Universe

01 Mar 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Magnetic fields have mysterious effects that can be dramatically counterintuitive, and they are ubiquitous throughout the Universe and can have influe...

Robots in Science Fiction

28 Feb 2022

Contributed by Lukas

In the late nineteenth century, highly contentious debates about prostitution were central to broader questions about women’s status within society,...

Sex Work

25 Feb 2022

Contributed by Lukas

In the late nineteenth century, highly contentious debates about prostitution were central to broader questions about women’s status within society,...

The Evolution of Cancer Therapy

24 Feb 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Professor Eleanor Stride will discuss the history and development of cancer therapy from its origins in Ancient Egypt - when surgery was the only opti...

Exploring the Deep Sea

23 Feb 2022

Contributed by Lukas

The Deep Sea is Earth’s last great frontier. After almost 150 years of exploration and research we understand it is deep, dark and definitely differ...

Prokofiev The Soviet Artist

21 Feb 2022

Contributed by Lukas

This lecture will follow the tortuous path of Prokofiev’s transformation into a Soviet artist. Prokofiev had pursued his career abroad and returned ...

The Oil Shock and Neoliberalism

18 Feb 2022

Contributed by Lukas

The oil shocks of 1973 and 1979 led to international disruption and a crisis in the post-war order. Domestically, weaker productivity growth, the sque...

Love and Music

17 Feb 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Tristan & Isolde, Romeo & Juliet, Pelléas & Mélisande are three pairs of lovers who have fired composers’ imaginations. Films like Lov...

The Maths of Proportion in Art, Design and Nature

15 Feb 2022

Contributed by Lukas

From the Ancient Greeks onwards, proportion and mathematics has been central to our ideas of form and beauty. This lecture looks at the famous golden...

The Brixton Riots: Policing the Community in the last 40 years

11 Feb 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Since the 1981 Brixton riots, many things have changed in British policing. However, Black people are still nine times more likely to be stopped and s...

Infections which use the Respiratory Route

10 Feb 2022

Contributed by Lukas

COVID-19, pandemic influenza and tuberculosis are examples of the remarkable ability of infections to use the respiratory route of transmission. Infec...

Early Protestant Missions to the Americas

09 Feb 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Protestant settlers in the Americas believed it was their duty to convert indigenous peoples to the true Gospel. Yet the task proved unexpectedly diff...

Error Control Coding

07 Feb 2022

Contributed by Lukas

When was the last time you opened a file and noticed a computer glitch? “Never” is the usual answer. Yet the underlying hardware makes continual e...

The Broken Cosmic Distance Ladder

04 Feb 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Measuring distances to astronomical objects outside our Galaxy is a surprisingly hard challenge: it wasn't until 1923 that Edwin Hubble obtained ...

Brexit: What Have We Learned So Far?

03 Feb 2022

Contributed by Lukas

What has Brexit come to mean? This lecture will explain how the Brexit deal the UK and the EU ended up with came to be. It will then investigate the n...

Terror and the Rule of Law

02 Feb 2022

Contributed by Lukas

The Revolutionary tribunals in 1790s Paris; the Moscow show trials of the late 1930s; and the prosecution of conspirators in the assassination attempt...

What is Happening to Christianity? Insights from Africa

01 Feb 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Christianity’s centre of gravity has shifted to the Global South. Prosperity churches, 'born again' politicians, prophets, healers and exo...

Structures in the Universe

28 Jan 2022

Contributed by Lukas

How did the cosmos transition into space characterised by galaxies in a plethora of different shapes of great beauty? This lecture will consider what ...

How To Make Financial Decisions

25 Jan 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Individuals and businesses make financial decisions all the time – whether to go to university, buy a house, build a factory, or train one’s workf...

Shostakovich on Trial: from Lady Macbeth to the Fifth Symphony

21 Jan 2022

Contributed by Lukas

This lecture focuses on one of the watershed moments of Soviet music history: the censure of Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, and the c...

Your Body Parts and the Law

20 Jan 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Do we own our own body parts? What can we do with them? Can we sell them and control what others do with them? People often say, "it’s my body&...

The Universal Value of Nature

17 Jan 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Does nature have a universal value? Can we consider natural capital as equivalent to financial capital? This lecture gives a brief history of value, e...

Sexually Transmitted and Intravenous Infections

14 Jan 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Some diseases are specialised in using sexual behaviour for transmission. Major pandemics including HIV and syphilis have been transmitted via this ro...

Pornography

07 Jan 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Pornography reflects as well as creates sexual norms and practices. The period from the 1960s to the mid-1980s has been called the 'Golden Age of...

Christmas Carols and Nostalgia

09 Dec 2021

Contributed by Lukas

This lecture takes a trip down Christmas's unique and emotionally complex memory lane via the Christmas Carol. Carols paint a colourful picture o...

Judicial Racism and the Lammy Review

02 Dec 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Judges, who are typically drawn from privileged backgrounds, wield vast power over the lives of the most marginalised people in society. This lecture ...

Attacks on Knowledge from Ashurbanipal to Trump

02 Dec 2021

Contributed by Lukas

This lecture explores the destruction of libraries, archives and other knowledge, from Babylonian times until now, and its implications for society to...

Early Protestant Missions to Jews, Muslims and Pagans: A Dangerous Model

01 Dec 2021

Contributed by Lukas

European Protestant and evangelical Christians did not have to look far to find 'infidels' in the 16th and 17th centuries: as well as the &a...

Women in Science Fiction

29 Nov 2021

Contributed by Lukas

For thousands of years, some men assumed that the original or ideal human type was male, with women being pictured as weaker or imperfect men. This an...

Food- and Drink-Borne Diseases

24 Nov 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Many major diseases are transmitted by food or drink. Cholera (water), brucellosis (milk), BSE/nvCJD, typhoid and many parasites are ingested as part ...

Compression

23 Nov 2021

Contributed by Lukas

When you tune into Netflix you might not be aware that the box in your living room starts a complex set of negotiations with servers on moving 563 Gby...

Free Thinking and the Rule of Law

22 Nov 2021

Contributed by Lukas

The law has been used to impose religious and moral conformity and uniformity of thought at many times in history, perhaps most (in)famously in the tr...

The Maths of Beauty and Symmetry

22 Nov 2021

Contributed by Lukas

People have always found symmetry aesthetically pleasing and examples of it are seen in the earliest art. The Platonic solids have been known to human...

How can music be "Socialist Realist"?

18 Nov 2021

Contributed by Lukas

This lecture will investigate the genesis of the Socialist Realism doctrine, which was imposed in 1934. The 'proletarian music' trend of the...

Holocaust History Under Siege in Poland

17 Nov 2021

Contributed by Lukas

For the second Annual Alfred Wiener Holocaust Memorial Lecture, Professor Jan Grabowski will discuss how scholars of the Holocaust find themselves con...

Nature's Numbers: Natural Capital Accounting

16 Nov 2021

Contributed by Lukas

How can nature be accounted for? How can we track how we are using nature and ensure we are not destroying the environment? Natural Capital is becomin...

Einstein's Blunder

15 Nov 2021

Contributed by Lukas

When Albert Einstein tweaked his newly invented equations of General Relativity in 1917, he had one goal in mind: to find a solution that described a ...

Perversion

11 Nov 2021

Contributed by Lukas

What is a perversion? This talk starts by exploring psychiatric and sexological debates about perverted sexual desires from the late nineteenth centur...

Ancient Greek and Roman Libraries

10 Nov 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Although Mesopotamian civilisations had assembled texts, the ancient Greeks brought the idea of the universal book collection to its near-legendary co...

What is a Religion? : Rethinking Religion and Secularism

09 Nov 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Most of us would consider Islam to be a religion, while we would generally view secularism as requiring the limiting of religion to the private sphere...

The Great Depression and 'Embedded Liberalism'

09 Nov 2021

Contributed by Lukas

The Great Depression posed a serious threat to democratic capitalism as economic nationalism flourished and Communism and Fascism offered alternative ...

Atomic Universe

03 Nov 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Subsequent to the Hot Big Bang, as the Universe expanded and cooled, atoms formed and, later still, decoupled from radiation. This lecture will cover ...

Portraits, Biographies and Public History

02 Nov 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Immense curiosity exists about the lives of people who lived in the past. Portraits and biographies play a major role in bringing the dead to life, bu...

Europe's Search for Security After World War One

01 Nov 2021

Contributed by Lukas

After the ravages of the First World War there was a widespread desire for 'sustainable security'. Contemporaries were preoccupied with hung...

The Manuscripts and Intellectual Legacy of Timbuktu

28 Oct 2021

Contributed by Lukas

The Malian city of Timbuktu is one of the world's oldest seats of learning and has an intellectual legacy of hundreds of thousands of manuscripts...

Plot

27 Oct 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Elaborate plotting is the novelistic skill least often valued by critics, even if relished by readers. This lecture will look at novelists who raise p...